Just come back from the speech by Scott McNealy and I couldn’t help comparing him to Bill Gates in July. Bill’s session was very sale orientated, lack of grand visions which was very disappointed as I expected more from the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft.

But back to Scott’s presentation…

First, how can you not like a presentation title “The Participation Age”. Scott summarised it as the time where people participates, engages in communities in variety of activities; blogging, ebaying, skyping etc etc. :-)

Second, I don’t remember the last time I saw the phrase “Digital Divide” and “Global Warming” in any CEO speech. And they are serious about it – building cheap computing devices so poorer nations can get online too and building lower power consumption chips. *clap clap clap*

I also learn something new today – Everyone who is looking at TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) especially wrt to Open Source is missing out one very important factor: the cost of technology exit. All software and hardware become obsoleted in 18-36 months so having an exit strategy makes a lot of sense. And the cost of the exit should be factor into the TCO upfront. Now, wouldn’t that change a lot of equations?

Despite being SUN orientated, Scott gave his speech with humor, cracking jokes and jabbing at Microsoft, Intel and IBM. Overall, I enjoyed it a lot :-)

ps: btw, many of the stuff mentioned (e.g. Display-GRID, x4100 etc) by Scott can also be found on Jonathon’s blog.